Himmelskörper2001

Himmelskörper is a drawn performance and performative drawing that plays with proximity and distance. Journeys of discovery are made across the naked skin of different people, their unique constellations of traces and textures across these sensitive surfaces - birth marks, freckles and scars - taking on a 'universal' meaning. A camera wanders across the pigmented landscape of skin. Is it looking for a topology or in doing so, creating one? Drawing on the body with a pen, Eva Meyer-Keller connects liver spots and other characteristic features of our largest organ into a close up star chart on which known star signs can be (re)discovered.
The pen camera's intimate recording of these body drawings is relayed to a projection screen. This undercuts the social conventions of proximity between the bodies of strangers while simultaneously providing a safe distance. A complex construction of framing, positioning and relationships of the gaze is created. The skin itself, with its protective as well as sensitive position as the body's permeable boundary, becomes a projection screen in the radical extraction of the extreme close up, on which the universe at large seems to appear.